JLC 2016: Tales of Renovation

Contractors, like fishermen, love to tell tales, and we love to hear them. With the added festivities of the NCAA basketball tournament and St. Patrick’s day, the atmosphere at this year’s JLC Live show in Providence, RI was electric. We had a wonderful time listening to our customers one-up each other with tales of renovations gone bad, remodeling disasters narrowly averted, and the classic “client whose house was practically a museum and if we had so much as dropped a nail on her hardwood floors she would have made us redo the entire house.” Stories are great, and it’s even better when our product is the hero!

Client perception: Ugly duckling or beautiful swan?

Builders often tell us our products don’t just protect floors – they protect the contractor’s image. When clients sink thousands of dollars – or hundreds of thousands of dollars – into a renovation, they’re going to pay attention to what their contractor is doing. Clients get nervous when their house looks like footage of a tornado’s aftermath, rather than a construction project. The contractor that takes extra care to prevent damage and who keeps things clean and safe throughout the course of a project is the contractor that earns clients’ trust and is rewarded with referrals. “Your products make me look good,” is a compliment we hear a lot from contractors.

The never-ending renovation story: A testament to durability

One of the highlights of the JLC show was when Raymond Valois with Valois Home Improvements brought us a scrap of Clean&Safe®Pro he’d had down on a project for over a year. The runner had been used on his client’s stairs during the course of an extensive year-long renovation, and had been walked on repeatedly by everyone from the homeowner’s kids to the plumbers and drywallers. It was one of the ugliest pieces of Clean&Safe®Pro we’d ever seen – but it had done it’s job, and done it well. The top layer of fabric wore through, but the bottom layer of fabric and the non-skid leak-proof backing had both held up perfectly through a full year of intense wear. The stairs were in great condition, the homeowner was thrilled with the product, Raymond was impressed, and so were we.

The fairy-tale ending

We can’t say every renovation project ends happily ever after, but our products can certainly help and we love to hear about it when they do. So give Clean&Safe®, Clean&Safe®Pro or SurfacePro® a try, and tell us your story!